Microsoft has announced the long awaited availability of Australia based Azure cloud services. Data centres are online in both Melbourne and Sydney, set up to provide fast and secure service access to the Asia Pacific region, expanding on its current offering of 18 worldwide regions.

Both Melbourne and Sydney datacentres are geo-redundant, meaning clients will have the ability to backup data in 2 locations simultaneously.  Microsoft will also soon offer a service called ExpressRoute – providing the fastest possible connection between your Azure and your on premise infrastructure.

Clients can choose which location to host their services, and easily relocate these from region to region – this, coupled with the centralised, single user interface, provides the ability to manage your global virtual infrastructure from one place.  Need a new server in London, easy, a few clicks of a button.  Want to move that server to a location with faster access for Japan or Taiwan, no problem!

Microsoft has also launched an app store for Cloud applications called Azure Marketplace.  This will be available in early 2015.